Rebel Island

I exchanged looks with Lindy. I hoped he was coming to the same conclusion as me—that whatever crap these guys had gotten themselves into, they weren’t murderers. They knew as little about Calavera as we did.

Then I heard the sound of a speedboat engine.

A sleek black twenty-two-foot Howard Bow Rider rounded the southern tip of the island, cutting its way through the chop. Nobody except the Coast Guard or drug runners would’ve been insane enough to be out in seas like this. And I had a feeling this boat was not part of the Coast Guard.

Chase scrambled to his feet. He and Ty and Markie watched silently as the boat approached. Two men stood at the helm. Both wore black rain gear, their hoods pulled down over their faces.

One man steered. The other held an assault rifle.

We had no place to run. No cover. If they decided to shoot us, we were dead. So I just stood there with the college kids, waiting to see what they would do.

The boat slowed, passing a hundred yards off to our right. The driver seemed to know this area well. He navigated cautiously, keeping to the main channel, away from the submerged parts of the island.

The boat slowed to an idle. Chase held up his sand-caked hands in a gesture of surrender.

The two men studied us. What they saw: five gringos standing in ankle-deep water where their stash of money should have been.

Without a word or gesture, the driver sped up. The boat veered away. It headed out to sea, leaving a silver wake like a scythe.

Ty exhaled. “Close.”

Chase stared at his empty hands. Markie’s face was pale.

“What?” Ty asked. “They’re gone, aren’t they?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him. But their message was clear: the Mexicans wouldn’t waste their time shooting Ty and his friends now. They would have it done properly, in a much more public place.

I knelt down and sifted through the water until I found the gun Markie had dropped. It was a .22, Ty’s marksman pistol. It occurred to me that a .22 could’ve been the same caliber that had killed Jesse Longoria.

“Start planning your statement for the police,” I told Markie.

“The drugs are gone,” he said miserably. “What’s the point of talking to the police?”

“Because it might be your only chance at staying alive.”

I sloshed back toward the ruined hotel, leaving the college kids standing in the water where the source of their next year’s tuition had washed away.

“What kind of wire?” Garrett asked.

We were sitting in the destroyed dining room. I was briefing Maia and Garrett on my fun-filled excursion into the surf. Garrett’s question took me by surprise.

I dug around in my pocket, found the frayed copper wire and handed it to him.

He scowled. “You found this in Lane’s closet?”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t for computers.”

I didn’t argue. Garrett was the computer programmer in the family.

He twirled the wire between his fingers. “So what’s it for?”

That’s when it hit me—why the wire had bothered me, something that should’ve been obvious. “It’s part of an IED.”

“A what?”

“Improvised explosive device,” Maia said, keeping her voice down. “A bomb.”

“A bomb?” Garrett definitely did not keep his voice down.

Jose and Imelda looked over from the kitchen doorway. They’d been scavenging breakfast for the guests and were now dividing up their loot—a bag of saltines, five green apples.

“A little discretion,” I told Garrett.

“Discretion,” he said. “Somebody tries to blow up Lane and you want discretion?”

“We don’t know that anyone was targeting Lane.” Maia put her hand on Garrett’s arm. As usual, she was able to calm him down a lot more than I could, but he still looked pretty damn angry.

He leaned toward me. “The guy we saw in Lane’s closet—he was real.”

“I think so.”

“We scared him out of there before he could plant a bomb. He dropped this wire.”

“One possibility,” I agreed. “But why target Lane?”

Garrett stared outside. In a burst of optimism, Jose and Imelda had removed the plywood from the last intact dining room window. Slate gray sky and sea spread toward the horizon like unwashed sheets.

“It couldn’t have been about her,” Garrett decided. “Besides, we’ll be outta here soon. Whatever this guy was trying to do—”

“Garrett,” I said, as gently as I could. “Do you want to ask her about it, or should I?”

He twisted his linen napkin. In the stormy light, his three-day whiskers looked grayer than usual. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “I’ll talk to her.”

Jose and Imelda went off to distribute their high-cuisine breakfast, which left Maia and me alone in the dining area, munching stale saltines and watching the rain make claw marks on the window.

“Drugs,” Maia said. “Someday maybe I’ll hear about a case that doesn’t involve drugs.”

We both knew the odds of that were long. It didn’t matter if you worked with runaways, prostitutes, politicians, murderers or socialites. Drugs were as omnipresent as sex and greed.

“Chris Stowall used his manager’s job to make some extra money on the side,” I told her. “He was mad at Alex for closing the hotel because his revenue stream was about to dry up. The twenty thousand from the boathouse—that was Chris’s life savings. He was getting ready to make a break for the mainland and disappear, as soon as he delivered Calavera to Longoria and Lindy. Chris stood to make an extra fifty grand from that. He figured he’d try to milk Chase and his friends, too. Get a little more money that way.”

“You don’t think he fabricated the Calavera story?”

“No. The email was real. Chris found it, somehow he realized what it meant. But I think he found something else, too. Something that really startled him.”

I told Maia about the statue in Alex’s room—the lady who looked like Rachel Brazos. I told her about my conversations with Lindy, who apparently had never visited the island before.

“Lindy’s wife,” Maia said. “You think that was a statue of her.”

I nodded. “She ran away. Now that I’m getting to know Benjamin Lindy a little better, I can’t blame her. I think she came here. The man who ran the hotel back in those days, Mr. Eli, he would’ve taken her in without question. She fell in love with Mr. Huff. She had another child, Alex. She died when Alex was young. I don’t know how. But I think that statue is of Alex’s mother.”

Maia shook her head. “Hell of a coincidence.”

“Not really,” I said. “Welcome to South Texas.”

I remembered what Lindy had said about the whole area being a close-knit community. Mr. Eli had said something similar, back when I was a kid: South Texas is just too small a place. Everyone is connected somehow.

Running into someone you knew, someone you were related to without realizing it—that was commonplace. The bloodlines in South Texas were as twisted as the barbed wire.

“Chris would’ve assumed the statue was Rachel Brazos,” I said. “He’d probably seen her picture in the media many times.”

“And that would’ve convinced him Alex Huff was Calavera,” Maia said. “He may have been right for the wrong reasons.”

I thought about that. Rachel Brazos and her two young daughters had died by mistake. I still had trouble believing Alex was a cold-blooded killer, but if he’d seen Rachel’s picture in the paper after the explosion, and realized who she was…That might be enough to cause remorse even in a man like Calavera.

“Perhaps Alex is gone,” Maia said. “Maybe he found a way off the island. When he left last night and gave Garrett that envelope…it sounded like he knew he wasn’t coming back.”

I wanted to believe her. If Calavera was gone, we were safe. Maybe.

“You really think that?”

“No,” Maia sighed. Her facial color seemed better this morning. She’d managed the stairs all right, over my protests, but still, the idea of her packing bags or moving around at all made me nervous.

“Imelda helped me pack,” she said. “She seemed distracted. I mean…even considering.”

“You need to rest,” I said. “We’ll get you back upstairs. Safer up there.”

She stared at the rain as it practiced pointillism on the window. “I’m tired of lying down. Tres, I think you should talk to her.”

“Imelda?”

“She wanted to tell me something, but she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. You should talk to her.”

“I’m not leaving you by yourself.”

“Please. I’m a big girl.”

I looked at her belly.

“That’s not what I meant, Tres. Find Imelda. See if she’ll talk to you.”

“Maia—”

“I’m perfectly fine. Besides, I’m not sure upstairs is any safer.”

“Meaning?”

She gave me a reproachful look: the same look she always gives me whenever I try to protect her.

“Tres, we both know that wire is a timing mechanism. What if Calavera wasn’t interested specifically in Lane? What if there are other bombs?”

By the time I caught up with Imelda, she was in the kitchen, salvaging linen from the floodwater. It seemed a hopeless task. She’d made a mountain of soggy napkins in the sink. Now she stood with her back to me, spreading out a tablecloth that looked like the Shroud of Turin.

My eyes drifted to the freezer room, then to the cellar door. I didn’t know if Chris Stowall and Jesse Longoria’s bodies were still in their respective places. I couldn’t see…or smell any change. That was fine by me.

“Imelda,” I said.

She turned toward me with a soft gasp. Her apron was sprinkled with brown stains. Her hair was tied back in a bun, but strands of it were coming unraveled, like a yarn ball a cat had been playing with.

“Señor, I didn’t hear you.”

I pulled myself up on the butcher block counter. “Maia thought I should talk to you.”

Imelda folded the tablecloth over her arm. “Is Señora Navarre well?”

“She’s worried about you. She thought you might have something to tell me.”

“Please, señor, if you wouldn’t sit on the counter. Jose is very fussy—”

“How did you lose your children, Imelda?”

Silence. She picked up a knife and set it in the sink. “It was five years ago. In Nuevo Laredo.”

“You lived in Nuevo Laredo?”

I tried not to sound surprised. These days, living in Nuevo Laredo was like sailing on the Titanic. For the past decade, the border town had been tearing itself apart as rival drug lords fought for control. Police, journalists, judges—all were gunned down on a regular basis.

“It was a repriso,” Imelda murmured. “Jose did nothing wrong. He was a simple cook. But…someone believed he told the police something…It isn’t important now. So many killed for no reason. A wrong look. A wrong word.” Her voice was heavy with old grief. “They killed my children. When we came here, we had nothing. Mr. Huff took us in. We owe him everything.”